Hello everyone,,
So, having some trouble with Image Magick and was wondering if you could clear up my mental model about how these things work.

Image Magick, it's a binary, works on the command line. But there's also Perl Magick that allows you to use Image Magick via Perl (but not in a way that it does calls out to the shell).

So the Perl Magick versions don't seem to line up with Image Magick. I'm assuming the versions don't need to be exactly in tandem? I say this because there are more recent releases of Image Magick than there are Perl Magick. If they were tied together, then Perl Magick users would be left out of these binary upgrades?

So, if we updated the Image Magick binaries... The Perl Magick modules has to be reinstalled/recompiled? Is that true? If so, why?

Side note... Image Magick taking down Perl, kinda lame. I guess that's the danger with using XS?

The simplest path forward is to build PerlMagick when you build/install ImageMagick. Just add --with-perl on your configure command-line. It will install a compatible PerlMagick along with the ImageMagick libraries/utilities. If you build PerlMagick separately, that should be OK too. ImageMagick has had a compatible ABI for a number of years now so build/install of PerlMagick should "just work."